 The Campy ROSSMANA long long
time ago, when I was an elementary school student, I was not,
as the hip would say, "hip". I was not cool. I
was not all that athletic. I was a brainiac though. A skinny
little
nerd. The last person in my class who you would have thought
would go to summer camp. Summer camp, where the poison ivy
flows
like grapevines and the uphill hiking never stops. Why am I
telling you this? Because I find it ironic that since I was
top of my 8th grade class I got a full scholarship of sorts
to attend a month long hell-hole disguised as an ever popular
summer camp in the middle of the shitty Canadian wilderness.
Camp Owakonze (pronounced "oh-wah-kahn-zee") was the name of the
place, and I swear that I shall never forget it for as long
as I live this tortured existence. Why did I go if I didn't
want to? I blame my parents. They used that whole "children
must be well rounded" cliché crap on me and when
that didn't work, they chloroformed my ass and threw me onto
the bus before I could wake up and protest and kick and scream
my way to freedom. It was a full 24 hour bus ride from St.
Louis
to Lake Baril, where Camp Owakonze was located on an island
in the middle of. It only took 12 hours to get to the Canadian
border, just to give you an example of how far into the middle
of nowhere this place was. No matter how hard I look I still
can't find the camp on a map. That's why I believe it only
truly
existed inside a portal to Hell.
Once there
all us kids were shuffled into random cabins spread all over
the island. I ended up sharing mine with a skinhead who believed
in the "Ooga Booga Man", some retard who laughed
uncontrollably when he was nervous (which, by the way, was
every 45 seconds),
a preppy loser who had everything but the family butler packed
in his duffle bag, and some guy who looked like Skeletor
with
a drug addiction. The days were cold, the nights were uncomfortably
sweltering and the lake (that we had to swim in and bathe
in)
was freezing. Freezing beyond the frigid and dark hearts that
sat still and unbeating inside the counselors' cobwebbed
chests.
Plus it was always overcast. It reminded me of England only
with even crappier food.
Okay okay,
it wasn't all bad there. The island was pretty big,
and there were some good sized playing fields and even an old,
log
gymnasium on it. The counselors' cabin even had electricity
(and a TV/VCR combo along with plenty of porn which was good
for satiating some late night viewing habits). Lots of frogs
and turtles to hunt and huge fish to catch. Plus I learned
how
to shoot a gun (was pretty damn good at it too, so WATCH OUT!)
and realized how totally and completely acrophobic I truly
am
at the hands of a literal ropes course held way up in the tippy
top branches of the islands' tallest trees. That was a fun
one,
as the instructor had to climb up 50 feet to unhook me and
basically carry my sorry soul back to terra firma while my
co-campers
laughed their butts off at me and called me "Chrissy Pissy"...
Those assholes!!! Didn't they realize that I now knew how to
shoot human shaped targets with a hunting rifle?!?!?!
Anyway, the
almost worst part turned best part of the whole wilderness
experience came about when every camper had to choose one
of three "adventures" to go on. There were the
hikers, the canoe-ers and the something-elsers. They got
together into semi-large groups and then went off on
their separate ways for a good week of pure nature survival
HELL. I declined all three groups (I wasn't stupid! There
were
sasquatch out there. I could smell them!), and instead lived
in a kind of luxury back on the island with the remaining
counselors.
I spent as much time as I wanted sleeping in, learning to chop
down trees with an axe and hand saw like a lumberjack, eating
deer jerky, and watching Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,
Good Morning Vietnam, and Big on the once forbidden
VCR over and over again. I remember the kids from the hiking
adventure thinking they were sooooo lucky and cool for finding
a McDonald's out in the middle of nowhere and running off with
a dozen hamburgers without paying some loser cashier.
The month-long
experiment of madness came to a close with a horribly performed
variety show put on by we/us, the campers. My cabin did a
news
mockumentary where I was the weatherman who kept forgetting
his lines (not part of the skit) and the skinhead was an
anchorman
who ate a live baby frog and then dropped his pants and did
the "Ooga Booga Man Dance" in front of everyone
(completely ad-libbed). Somehow we lost first place.
The bus ride back home sucked pretty bad and I even hallucinated
that the full moon always on the horizon split apart like a
fertilized egg cell. That just about summed up the whole summer.
What did
I think of My Summer at Camp Owakonze? After taking
over a decade to try and forget about it I can now look back
upon
that summer of despair with just a little more exuberance and
fondness... But not much more. I still have to give
it a thumbs down for scarring me from the inside out with mental
anguish and a bad case of the runs that is still apparent
to
this day.
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